A Woman Is No Man

by Etaf Rum

“Soon you’ll learn that there’s no room for love in a woman’s life. There’s only one thing you’ll need, and that’s sabr, patience.”

“It doesn’t matter where you live as long as your home is yours. Free of occupation and blood.”

She wondered what he saw, whether he knew that if he opened her up, he would find, right behind her ribs, only a fist of rot and mud.

She knew that the suffering of women started in the suffering of men, that the bondages of one became the bondages of the other.

For so many years she had believed that if a woman was good enough, obedient enough, she might be worthy of a man’s love. But now, reading her books, she was beginning to find a different kind of love. A love that came from inside her, one she felt when she was all alone, reading by the window. And through this love, she was beginning to believe, for the first time in her life, that maybe she was worthy after all.

She just like me fr

She saw the chain of shame passed from one woman to the next so clearly now, saw her place in the cycle so vividly. She sighed. It was cruel, this life. But a woman could only do so much.

“You have to have a home first to be uprooted from it. You have to know what love is to feel alone.”

“Mothers carry the entire family—arguably the entire world—on their shoulders. That’s why heaven lies under their feet.”